


Nightmare

by platiumdragon



Category: DragonFable (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 16:29:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21449248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platiumdragon/pseuds/platiumdragon
Summary: Recently adopted Calix finds that he can't sleep, but that's okay because neither can his new mom.
Kudos: 3





	Nightmare

Yawning, Calix navigated his way out of his room through half-lidded eyes. Having been terrified out of a dream state and now knowing that sleep would be impossible, he simply wanted to clear his mind by walking around Ravenloss and seeing what a beautiful city it had become despite the trash heap it had once been. But as he made his way down the hall, he heard a scrapping sound and then hushed swearing. It was a voice he recognized but didn’t expect to hear so late at night.  
“Whisper?” he questioned as he rounded a corner and found her, illuminated in the glow of a lamp as she carved into what may have been a femur.   
She loomed over and blinked her violet eyes slowly.  
“What time is it?” she eventually asked.  
“Late…? Why are you awake?”  
“I could ask the same of you.”  
He glanced away, not wanting to admit that he was awake due to a nightmare. It sounded too childish, so instead he said, “I just wanted to get a drink.”  
She raised an eyebrow, its black color fading to the original white. But she simply shrugged her shoulders and let the comment pass.  
“What exactly are you doing?” he then asked.  
“Oh this? Learning to carve. It’s shit.”   
She laughed and brushed bone dust off of her lap. He looked a bit closer at what she had accomplished, and couldn’t see much beyond one curving line. Whisper frowned at this fact as well, took up her carving tool, and tried to do more. She was holding the bone between her thighs, and Calix grew concerned over the injury that could occur from her hand slipping, which seemed quite likely to happen with her hand shaking the way it was. Thankfully for them both, she abandoned the endeavor almost as soon as she started.  
“My left hand is useless,” she then declared with a sigh, releasing the pressure of her thighs and letting the femur drop with an audible thud. She glanced away, and Calix could see that she was staring at her right arm, or at least what was left of it. The stump, cut off just above the elbow, was wrapped up in spider webs. “Ayy, kid,” she then called, “are you going to get a drink and go back to sleep or what?”  
“I… And you?”  
“Neither of us are sleeping tonight, I see.” Whisper patted the open space on the couch beside her. “Sit,” she encouraged him. “Let's talk.”  
There was no way out of this one, so Calix found himself stepping over and sitting beside her, sitting as far away as that two-seater would allow and hunching his body forward a little.   
“Get comfortable,” Whisper urged him. “It's been a week and you still feel like a stranger in this house.”  
“I’m not…” Used to having people care about me, he wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t find the voice.   
“I hope we're not being too pushy. We want to be a family, but we get that that’s not something that we can demand. You don’t have to call us anything special, you don’t have to pretend that we're something we're not, you can just treat us like… friends.”  
“I-it’s none of that! I appreciate everything that you and Vayle have done for me. I don’t mind this at all. I like this. It’s just…”  
“It’ll take some adjusting,” she finished for him, and he nodded.   
“For the longest time, it was just me and Timoria against the world. I’m not sure what to do here.”  
“Be a kid. You’re what, fourteen? Enjoy some childhood.”  
Whisper leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. Calix glanced over to her, and in the silence examined her features. The dyed black hair, the purple feathered wings, the scars down her neck, those were all so familiar at that point. It was comforting in a way he didn’t expect it to be.  
“So… why bone carving?”  
Whisper laughed heartily and admitted, “You spend this many nights awake and you start finding dumb shit to try.”  
“Do you find it hard to sleep?”  
“Literally impossible. I’m a Death Knight, kid. We're cursed. I haven’t had a wink of sleep in at least a decade.”  
“Cursed?”  
“Eternal unrest. I can’t sleep, and I can’t die. Well, not of natural causes, anyway. I can be killed, but that sure doesn’t seem to be happening. Magic, eh? Sometimes, it has consequences.”  
“Why would you do something like that to yourself?”  
“Well, I honestly didn’t even know at the time. Never bothered to read the fine print when I demanded that Sir Malefact teach me. Oh, Calix, I was so dumb when I was young. Well, I’m still dumb, but at least I’m not power-hungry like I was then. I tried so many disciplines, but I had to settle on the cursed one. At least I am quite strong. And you? Why a ChaosWeaver when that brand of magic is so hated?”  
“It’s who I am. It’s my whole identity. It’s in my family line. We're ChaosWeavers; what’s wrong with that? Maybe past ChaosWeavers have been brutes, but that doesn’t have to be me. You’re a Death Knight, and people call you a hero. I… I want to be a hero too, one day.”  
“How noble.” She smiled at him, but said, “But before you can save others, you have to save yourself.”  
“Save… myself? From what?”  
“Probably that thing that’s giving you nightmares bad enough to keep you awake the whole night.”  
Calix’s face lit up read from embarrassment from that statement. Whisper got to her feet and nodded for Calix to follow. She led him out the door into the city, lit up by a soft, violet glow.   
“I remember when this place was a shithole,” Whisper spoke as they walked. “Me and Echo, we got our wings here. Seeing Beige and the others on this trip, they were like extreme versions of us. We were just the test subjects.” Her violet eyes grew distant and she recounted, “I hated this place, but Echo believed in it. She asked me to come and fight with her in the Ravenloss War, and I couldn’t say no. Me, her, Tomix, Riadne, we all fought them, the ChaosWeavers. I don’t know if we ever fully realized what we were fighting.”  
She looked to Calix, and he noticed and glanced away, kicking a rock that had dared to cross his path.   
“I can’t blame you,” he then told her. “You did what you had to. And many of us were well beyond redemption. You did your best. You destroyed the Judgement Wheel. The only man to blame is Vaal.”  
“Then don’t beat yourself up over it, either. You were so young, there wasn’t much you could do.”  
“I know. I just miss them. My friends and family, I really wish they were all still here.”  
He felt a hot tear drip off his nose and wiped his arm against his face to stop the waterworks in their tracks, but they wouldn’t stop. He had paused at that point, feebly trying to wipe away the tears that kept on coming, coating his arm in the snot dripping from his nose.  
“Hey, hey, calm down.”  
He looked up to see Whisper backtracking over to him. The concern was obvious to see in her eyes and she knelt down before him and pulled him close, hugging him tight.   
“Hey, just cry,” she whispered to him. “It's alright. You’ve been too strong for way too long.”  
And she was right. As Calix broke down, he told her everything in between haggard breaths and tearful coughs. He told her about his big, happy family, about how his baby sister starved when the curse took hold, his younger sister was separated from him, his father was killed, and his mother lost her mind. About Timoria found him when he was dumbfounded at the sight of human flesh on his bones and how she taught him how to survive through any means necessary. About how he destroyed any image of Vaal and how he fought against the new settlers of Ravenloss and became a menace to most others in the orphanage. He told her about the many times he escaped for weeks on end, about meeting Tomix and finding that he looked up to him rather than hating him for his part in the slaughter of the ChaosWeaver people. He spoke about finding out that Vaal was going to be on the Void Ship crew and sneaking on board to kill him before realizing that he was the one that could die, as he hung by the neck in Vaal’s cruel grasp before Echo came to save him. He apologized a lot about the loss of Whisper’s arm, recognizing himself as the distraction that allowed her arm to be bitten off by the decadere (and she told him just as many times that it was most certainly not his fault). And finally he spoke about having a new family but the nightmares that came to haunt him every night distracted him from the possibility.  
He cried until he was exhausted, and Whisper held him through all of it. When he was done, she placed a motherly kiss on his forehead.   
“I will protect you,” she promised him, “from anything and everything. We both will. So now, you can just be a kid.”  
It was the thing he wanted most of all, and it was finally within his reach.

**Author's Note:**

> So I had a random thought, and I followed it.  
Late night writing is fun. Sorry if there are any mistakes or if it seems... I don't know... weird?   
I love my boy, Calix, but he does have a lot of problems stemming from his past. By the time of In Her Shadow, he has them pretty figured out, but I really wanted to think through how he was before when he was having nightmares all the time and was just really melancholy and depressed. After this he started picking up hobbies like gardening and reading and slowly but surely turned into a more joyous kid that decided that he wanted to become a hero and help people just like Whisper and his Aunt Echo.


End file.
